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A Discipline of Programming
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Author: Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
List Price: $83.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 013215871X
Publisher: Pearson Education POD (28 October, 1997)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 161,176
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
excellent
This is an excellent book in reasoning about programs. It is fairly rigorous and requires a bit of math maturity, and the reader should be warned that formal methods of computer science have evolved quite a bit since 1976. By this I refer to axiomatic program verification and semantics. The key characteristic of this book is that it is built around discussing real world algorithms. This makes the practical consequences of the analysis more evident than in a typical textbook format.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there
I really wanted to get my hands on this book and now that i have (via interlibrary loan) i want to warn folks that this is not light reading. I found a majority of this book very boring and all but impenetrable. I like Dijkstra's English prose, but when he embarks on the math I wish he'd state the point of each set of formulae above them. It would have also helped if he stressed practical uses of his insights vis-a-vis an actual programming language. This "just shows how much I know" I'm sure, but I suspect many people will feel similarly. FYI: My background is Bachelor's in C.S. with a C.S. GPA of 3.87/4.0. A depressing indictment of U.S. education, Dijkstra would say :)
Rating: 5 out of 5
computer science classic
---Coming from no less a person than Dijkstra, this book, though dated takes programming to a different level. It blesses the discipline of programming with the mathematical formalism and begins to look at it as a piece of mathematics. I picked this book while doing my CS undergraduate, and made me fall in love with CS, all over again. It does NOT however talk much about programming techniques or methods! It looks at programs from as formal a view point as possible and builds a framework for constructing 'correct' programs..or more correctly a framework for 'proving the correctness' of a program. It takes you to the point of considering programs as poetry.. Its difficult to contemplate the application of the thoeries developed here into practice, though a lot of it is used in some form or the other, but nonetheless it makes an excellent reading. I recommend it to anybody seriously interested in computer science .
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